I did, though not a little affronted at the idea of using the dead for nothing more elevated than a telecommunications system. He rattled on, “And surely it is only a matter of time before we can cut out the medium, or rather become the medium, and have only to open our mouths to transmit the words of others without having, or needing to have, the least idea what we are saying. Like birds, tweet tweet—”
“In fact this is what we already do. The Headmistress says—”
“Aha! You see? You quote! And”—for he saw my frown—“why not indeed? Why form your own thoughts when all the wisdom of better men, and of course women, is at the tip of your tongue? Why ever read another book? The information to which the dead are privy is perhaps a little behindhand, yesterday’s paper so to speak, but there are ways around that—if one wishes to put a person’s present body of knowledge at one’s disposal, one has only to kill him off! It may come to pass that people regard life as a mere apprenticeship for the more lasting use to which they may be put hereafter. Tweet and retweet!”23
He kept on chuckling and attempting various birdcalls with a levity that seemed entirely out of keeping with our situation and, annoyed, I turned my face away and, absently patting the now stupefied cat trussed against my chest, let my attention drift.
But now what was he talking about? “New leadership, just as soon as we can pry the old girl loose. A good man at the helm.” He saw the question in my face: “Not me, thank you very much! I’m no babysitter, or pettifogging administrator. I will be quite occupied enough with—well.” He cleared his throat. “But you, now; there will be a place for someone who knows where they keep the twine and whether the bodies are filed under D for dead or E for extremely fucking dead, excuse my French. You could do quite well for yourself as a secretary or even an assistant mistress. I’ll put in a word for you, see if I don’t.”
I said nothing. He did not press me, or seem to notice how utterly my mood had changed. Do quite well for myself! Put a word in! He did not have the faintest idea of my true character. A good man at the helm! Change a-coming! Was everything I had worked for to be, with a fatuous laugh, snatched away?
An exclamation—“Good Lord!”—jerked me from my reverie. I tightened my grip on the branch, feeling how the floodwaters now swirled cold around my dangling feet, and looked wildly about. The day was noticeably darker. “Jane, what the devil is that?
A gray behemoth was wheeling slowly around a snag in the shallow waters near the new shoreline. Now I saw it shake itself loose and glide slowly toward the plunging waters of the main current, then plunge into the body of the flood and come wallowing, rolling, sounding and breaching, fluking and lobtailing toward us. As may be seen by my choice of verbs, I first took it, absurdly, for a whale. Then, “The Sky Lung!”
“The what?”
“Our—sort of balloon—the carriage house must be—”
I did not have time to explain further, because the Sky Lung now flung itself at us, as if with murderous intent. If it had been fully inflated, it would have bounced, or burst, or indeed have already taken flight. But it was a loose wallowing sac, and it wrapped a trailing part of itself around the branches of our perch. The rest of it tried to keep going.
“Hold on!”
The branch was bucking wildly. At the perigee I was dipped in the flood to the hips. The cat stuck its claws into my stomach and screamed.
“We have to disentangle it, or we will be for it! Hold on to my belt, there’s a good girl.”
I worked my fingers under his belt and leaned out along my own higher branch as, holding his own branch with his knees as if he were breaking a “bronco,” he scooted farther out and in water up to his waist began shoving and pulling and kicking at the Sky Lung.
For a moment it seemed possible that he would succeed. Then with one great rending that almost unseated me twice, first on the yank and then on the recoil, the tree split down the center, and his half, still attached to the Sky Lung, was instantly swept downstream. I almost certainly could not have saved him, but I did not try. At the first great tug I had removed my hand from his belt.
For a moment I saw his white, shocked, denatured face raised unseeingly to mine, and then the Sky Lung with its cargo, moving smoothly now, swept around a curve and was gone.
It was a long, cold, roaring, heaving night. Unseen things rushing downstream thumped the tree and sent vibrations right through me. There were cracking, rending sounds. I locked my arms around the straining branch and endured. The cat, half crushed beneath me, was a hot reminder of life. Gradually the wild, springing motion settled into a smooth, regular swaying. It lulled me into a wakeful sort of sleep in which I never quite lost consciousness of the branch that had become my world.
I was awoken by the plaintive yowls of the cat. It was morning. The river, still high, but flat and glassy, had slipped back between its banks. The tree was half a tree. I was alone with the cat in it. And here was the Headmistress with the groundskeeper and a stout stick, wading through the smooth brown water to help me home.
Readings
from “A Visitor’s Observations”
On the Difficulty of My Task
Nick Peachie had been persuasive. I did take a dose of ectoplasm. I took more than one. And I am ashamed to say that I take ectoplasm still, though because I am no longer resident of the Vocational School, all outsiders having been summarily dismissed after the Headmistress’s death, I have had to seek it out on the streets, with the predictable risks to my health, safety, and reputation. Yes, I am one of those! But do not worry, I am quite harmless. Perhaps, as the world worsens, as whole countries tip and pour themselves into oblivion—or pour others—you can forgive me my little habit. For it is one that nobody kicks. We imagine death can be consumed, like everything else, when death is itself the mouth.
And so we have the situation that obtains today: a world of scooped-out semblances, colorful shells on the shores of a more final absence. Inside those shells? A void, barely thickened by thought, like a broth by a dusting of cornstarch. Increasingly I can see it, a gray nothingness pluming out of mouths and nostrils, seeping out of pores, and hanging muggy in the air. People rush together, slide their fingers into orifices, and touch empty space. There is simply nothing there. Never mind, there is nothing here either: No one’s fingers brush that nothingness. If there is a slight feeling of letdown it does not have a chance to form itself into a complete thought before it wisps away. “I thought”—and it is gone. Or do I imagine it, is it just me? No, the dream of an ending, an answer, a final solution—I am not the only one who has found it seductive. I often think of the Headmistress, who understood its temptations better than anyone. But let me tell you something she also understood: Death is no ending. The more you feed it, the more it wants. For death has two faces. From one angle, it looks like closure. But from the other, endless opening.24
Possibly one could say the same of any dream. I would not know, I have no other dreams.
My job is threatened, and I do not care. My pen is slowing . . . Though I do not altogether blame myself for that. I have the impression that, although one could write almost any number of books about the Vocational School without exhausting the subject, not one of these would come to a satisfactory conclusion. All, all are doomed to wind up in embarrassed circumlocutions and increasingly prolonged silences, finally breaking off in midsentence halfway down the page. Such has certainly been the fate of my own attempts, of which this is only the most recent. For I have begun any number of accounts of the school, in some of them adopting a whimsical tone (for it strikes me, at least it does when I am in a lighthearted mood, that a Merry Andrew would find much to thrum his funny bone in its activities) . . . In others, cool ratiocination . . . In others the manner of a beloved yarn-spinner, rehearsing a well-lubricated tale in his local tavern for the benefit of cronies who bawl out their favorite lines in unison.
Yet all of these, despite promising beginnings, some dashing
flourishes, and substantial effort, suffered a progressive attenuation in style, growing so stark and simple as to freeze the marrow (and I am a florid, comfortable stylist! Like the good bourgeois I was brought up to be, I believe that one can never have too many throw pillows, or adjectives) until at last they petered out altogether: this one resembling a line of footprints leading out into a Sahara (concluding in a smudged and trampled patch and perhaps a few bleached scraps of fabric)—this other, bubbles rising in a quicksand—and this, a pirate ship’s plank extending over shark-ridden waters—none of which the reader would be advised to follow without having first commended her soul to her Maker!
While never, or not formerly, a morbid person, I am inclined to think that the peculiar fatality to which my books have fallen victim derives from their subject, and not, or not only, from my shortcomings as an author. At the heart of all the works and days of the school is the irreducible mystery (or maddeningly simple fact—it makes no odds) of death, which effortlessly absorbs into its white and stinging silence as many words as one may throw its way. For all our attempts to map, chart, document, and in short encyclopedify death only serve to illuminate the activities of those who haunt its periphery, while driving the phenomenon itself yet further into its lair. To do the Headmistress justice, I feel sure that she would not only acknowledge this circumstance, but describe it as our great good fortune, for death is in her estimation the inexhaustible wellspring, clear and cool, from which she, and I, and every man Jack of us drink without ceasing until, plunging headlong into the waters of oblivion, we ourselves cease to be.
It is this ravening whiteness, and it alone, that I now perceive in every map, model, formula, and printed page published under the colophon of the open mouth, the Vocational School’s house imprint. Though I be at first impressed by the inky masses of data, notations, footnotes, endnotes, diagrams, and illustrations, my attention irresistably adverts to the white space that, ever interpenetratingly present, seems to press in from the margins and well up between words, within them, and in the counters of the very characters that make them up: a milky acid capable of consuming all. Even to glance at a Vocational School publication is to begin to feel a hollowness tunneling down the optic nerve to the brain. The effect spreads to other texts as well; increasingly I see any printed page as as an essentially and ideally white one, only accidentally dirtied with a few insignificant words over which the eyes indifferently scud, or as one whose progressive erasure, though still incomplete, has left of a once-complete text only remnants, on which it would be futile to base a speculation as to the cargo of argument it once bore, especially as they, too, they will soon be consumed by the void that is in any case richer in interest than any words—that lures us as the lap and breast of the world—and is the answer to every question, fully satisfactory as no other answer to no other question you have ever asked has ever been, your whole life long. And even such outrageously overstuffed sentences as the one I have just finished writing seem to me to be all too thin. I confess that I even detect in myself a certain reckless eagerness to see these texts through to their destined end as identically blank sheets of paper. My eyes fall on a page, intricately maculated with numbers, and dates, and clauses, and subclauses, and sub-subs, such as the living relish, and I see the rising tide of whiteness licking at the ink, and I am glad of it, and even (fingers twitching on my eraser) long to help it along.
Letters to Dead Authors, #15
Dear Jane,
At first my Theatrical Spectacle bid fair to be another disappointment, for despite the press release I sent out with my assurances that the road was passable again, bridges sound, etc., only one reporter made an appearance, that same fellow, Cartwright, who has been hanging around for weeks. The rest of the party was composed of a single trustee, a prospective donor whom I have been cultivating for months, and our dear, ubiquitous Dr. Beede, though he was not invited. But I was not to be deterred from taking this step into the limelight. The tour itinerary was planned; it would yield edifying spectacles at every turn. The children had been drilled in their roles and awaited only a sign from me. I had left nothing to chance—or so I thought! For the Spectacle proved more spectacular than I could ever have anticipated.
I believe that the story will propel the Vocational School to national, perhaps international fame! People all over the world will soon be reading about me in the newspaper. I might spare this nib and enclose a clipping, but I am eager to record the day’s events in my own words.
Hoping to give more members of the press a chance to arrive, I do not take our small group directly to the auditorium. After issuing them umbrellas, I lead them on a tour of the grounds during which we stop twice to watch the older students practicing their calisthenics in the fresh air, rain-splattered but healthy, their cheeks like apples, as they say, as I hope the reporter will say, in his article. Then usher them into a rotunda with a high ceiling of streaked glass sectored with leading around a sort of compass rose at the center, made of smaller facets intricately pieced together. The room looks different to me, no doubt because I am seeing it through the eyes of the Public. A flock of crows swings across the gray sky above. The glass is flawed or the birds are: They stutter in and out of existence, their flight paths composed of dotted lines. And now they are dot-dashing back, short long, short short long—telegraph messages. The ceiling gives all the light in the room; this falls down very cool and clear on the thing in the center of the floor.
“Gentlemen, I present: The Wrong Tree.”
The birds swirl and land all at once: a tattoo of almost simultanous thumps. Their feet are suddenly clearly visible.
Our visitors approach the tree. The reporter exclaims, “Why, it’s made of paper! What the devil?” It is indeed made of paper, of printed paper in fact, the pages of books, but torn, wrenched, pulverized, so that all one sees are broken words, mere letters, angled every which way, merging and overlapping.
“Chewed,” I say definitively. I regard the tree with satisfaction. The others, with incomprehension.
“Under the paper—”
“Under the paper, yes, there is a tree, once living. Now clad in an integument or second bark of paper—which is, of course, the afterlife of trees.”
“Wasn’t there some trouble with the town over this?” asks the reporter.
Someone has done his research! I run my hands down my skirt before answering. “A little controversy over what they were pleased to describe as vandalized library books. All feathers have been smoothed and the books in question replaced. We have, of course, no desire to deprive our town’s no doubt ardent readers of material, even if we differ on the best use of certain texts. And now please come this way—the auditorium—I have arranged something a little special . . .”
I take pleasure in pointing out to the reporter the red tongue of the aisle carpet, the velvet uvula decorating the proscenium arch and the realistically pocked and shriveled tonsils concealing the wings from the view of the audience. “Where are the teeth?” the reporter quips, not knowing that, as I subsequently inform him, the Teeth really is what we call those advanced students and faculty who act as the watchdogs of tradition during services in the Word Church, which he is welcome to attend, if he chooses; the auditorium is nothing compared to the Church, though well enough for its purpose.
“You look tired!” I tell him gaily. “Shake it off, we have hours still to go!”
The trustee has seated himself several rows from the front, impassive, upright, only sagging slightly in the middle, like a bag of feed propped up on its end. The prospective donor joins him. The reporter slouches into an aisle seat near the back. The fact that he does not sit in the front row for a better view, though it is unoccupied, as are nearly all of the rows, enrages me. Because of course he has not chosen his seat at random. He wishes to let me know that he is not to be coaxed into partisanship by the sweet voices of children. Never fear, I think, sweet is not the word. And it is true that both reporter
and trustee jerk back when little Harmony Upshaw steps through the still closed curtains, opens her mouth, and allows the bass rumble of a Elizabethan actor to roll forth. She (or he, through her) is (was) a ham, but a skilled one, plying the bellows of her lungs to inflame a cool audience. I am pleased to see the reporter’s attention sharpen.
Joey Minks, emerging next, plays opposite in a female part. He is slight and fair enough to play the heroine. But his voice is that of a woman grown—a mellow contralto with a not unpleasant hoarseness, like a haze of cigar smoke. Incidentally there is no reason the girl could not channel the woman, and the boy the man, as one might expect, but the dramatic instincts of our director have not played him false; the effect is striking. The two depict, of course, Tragedy (Minks) and Comedy (Upshaw), first quarreling, then wooing; a duet concludes these preliminaries, and then the curtains, somewhat jerkily, are drawn open as Tragedy and Comedy exeunt stage right, arm in arm.
Scene One. An old-fashioned, institutional-looking classroom: bare floorboards, high windows, mostly empty shelves, charts and maps and wax models of heads and other unidentifiable objects. The standing blackboard is covered with diagrams among which an open mouth—bristling with numbered points, each with an explanatory text—can be clearly seen. The mouth appears more intricate than the uninitiated would expect. The students are disposed about the room, dressed in matching school uniforms: black pinafores or short pants and blazers. The pale light makes them appear waxen and unwell. Some are standing in front of music stands with hands folded, softly gulping or moaning in rhythm. Some have small masks attached to fine wire structures that project from their faces like small, horizontal Eiffel Towers. Some have rags or curled pieces of paper coming from their mouths. Many wear blindfolds. Some of the bigger girls have soft woven slings swinging below their chins like feed bags. At regular intervals someone scuttles onstage and squeezes these with white-gloved hands, establishing their emptiness, and hurries offstage.
Riddance Page 31
